She snorted.
"All right," said Weiss. "I don't go away. I go to the police. Bremer goes down for murder; you go down for blackmail. It's nothing to me."
That got her. She thought it through. "How do I know you won't tell the cops anyway?"
"Because why would I? I just want the girls. You and Bremer can torture yourselves to death, for all I care. You deserve each other."
Adrienne Chalk thought it through some more. "They took the daughters into homes," she said then. "After Suzanne was killed and Charlie booked it, the daughters got taken into foster homes, and like that. The older one, Mary, she went bad, ran off. I don't know where she is. I don't, I swear. The younger one, Livy, Olivia, she's in Phoenix. She's a—whattaya call it?—like a counselor, a shrink or something."
"Olivia Graves—is that still her name?"
"Yeah, that's right. She's not married or nothing. Olivia Graves."
Weiss pushed up off the windowsill. "Thanks," he said. He took Adrienne Chalk's revolver out of his pocket. He tossed it onto the bed. It bounced on the mattress next to her legs.
In a flash Adrienne Chalk threw the envelope aside and pounced on the gun. She snapped it up with both hands. She pointed it dead at Weiss. "You never should've slapped me, you son of a bitch," she said. She pulled the trigger.
Weiss was already walking to the door. He already had his hand in his jacket pocket again. When the hammer of the 500 snapped down, he paused and turned. He shook his head. He brought a fistful of bullets out of his pocket. He flung them in Adrienne Chalk's face. One hit her; the rest flew all over the room, pattering on the wood floor.
"What a skank," Weiss muttered.
The bullet that hit Adrienne Chalk fell on the mattress and rolled under her knee. She was furiously trying to dig it out, get ahold of it, trying to shove it into one of the cylinder's chambers as Weiss left the apartment and shut the door behind him.
24.
Later it came to him, in the desert, in the dark. He knew what he had to do.
He'd been driving for hours and hours by then. Pushing on, relentless, through relentless emptiness. Rain came be- fore night fell, a slashing downpour. Then night fell under stuttering thunder. Awesome threefold barbs of lightning jagged from the core of the vast sky to the horizon. The desolate land lit up—endless desolation at every window, in all directions—and then vanished into desolate darkness ... the sheeting rain on the windshield ... the wipers working back and forth.
Weiss drove on, tired, tired. It was hard going. Hard to see anything, hard to make any time. Hour after hour, slogging through the rain. He gripped the wheel, peered into the night.
He thought about Julie.
The Graves family had been poor. That's what Chalk's old newspaper stories said. The father, mother, and two daughters lived in a cramped, dilapidated house on the edge of the east city. The father had worked in a tire warehouse before the company shut down. Afterward, he mostly did odd jobs, off the books, hauling and lifting for whatever outfit would use him. The mother, Suzanne, was a drunk and a meth addict—a whore, too, when she needed money for the drugs. Otherwise, she worked in the local Hoffman's department store from time to time.
The kids, Mary and Olivia, were thirteen and ten.
The neighbors said Mary took care of her little sister. She played mother to her, made sure she ate, made sure she got to school most days. She took Olivia to their room and hid there with her when the parents fought. The parents fought a lot, the neighbors said. Suzanne brought men to the house when her husband was out—long-haired, tattooed toughs in the drug trade. Charles suspected what was going on, and that's what started the fighting. The police had been called in once or twice to break it up.
No one was very surprised when Suzanne woke up dead one morning. She was supposed to go to work that day, and her girlfriend found her body when she came to pick her up. "It was like a broken watermelon, her head; stuff all over the pillow," the girlfriend told the papers. Everyone said it was shocking, but no one was very surprised.
The husband and daughters were thought missing at first. There was some talk about a drug deal gone sour, a kidnapping, and so on. But it turned out the girls were standing outside Olivia's elementary school, unharmed, waiting patiently for the doors to open. Their father had dropped them off there just before dawn. Then he'd driven away. The police found his pickup later that evening. He himself was never seen again. The children didn't seem to know what had happened.
Weiss gripped the wheel, peered into the night. The Taurus pushed through the spattering rain. Weiss thought about the Graves family, Charles and Suzanne, Mary and Olivia. After a while this thing happened to him, this thing that was always happening. He began to live through the story as if he were in someone else's mind. It was strange. It just came over him. It was part of that weird Weissian knack of his, that knack of knowing who people were, knowing what they would do. He found himself feeling his way through the past as if he had been there, as if he had been Charlie Graves—Charlie Graves who became Andy Bremer—an odd-jobbing lowlife who hammer-killed his junkie wife and became a prosperous churchgoing family man. Weiss could feel how the one kind of man always lived inside the other somehow, the family man lived inside the lowlife all along. Maybe Charlie Graves didn't know it at first. He married Suzanne and, at first, it was all right. But if Suzanne was anything like her half sister, she was a seething, vicious bitch. Savage to her husband, making fun of him when he was down. Smacking the kids around. Drunk, drugged. Bringing the tattooed drug dealers into her house and trading with them, a ride inside her for some booze, some coke, some meth. Charlie could've lived with it, maybe, Weiss felt. Lived with it or just skipped out and left it behind. But there was this other man inside him, this better man. And this man, this Andy Bremer, looked out through Charlie's eyes and saw his kids, his daughters. He saw the looks on their faces. He saw ashes and powder on the living-room rug and half-eaten food on the sofa. He smelled the sex stench of strangers, his wife's perfume. And those looks—even in his sleep, he saw those looks on the two girls' faces. It wasn't enough just to leave. He had to get free. He had to get them all free and he had no money and no place to go and he couldn't even think with the bitch screaming at him the minute he came through the door...
The rain thundered down on the Taurus and the thunder rolled and the desert lay invisible at every window. Weiss's right hand closed tight on the steering wheel, but he felt the wooden handle of the clawhammer in his hand.
Afterward, when the hammer slipped from his fingers, there would've been nothing left for Charlie Graves but the shabby reality of the thing: his wife's crushed skull, the brains on the pillow, the splayed female body, which he had known. And the girls, the two little girls, huddled together in one of their beds, clinging to each other against the horrible noises from the next room, wide-eyed when he opened the door and the wedge of light fell on them, on the looks on their faces...
By then Charlie Graves was gone, was dead, as dead as his wife. He had killed himself killing her. He went through the rest of it like an animated corpse. He hurried his daughters out of the house, drove them to the elementary school in the predawn dark, turning the steering wheel, pressing the pedals mechanically. He left them at the schoolhouse door with a monotone good-bye. And he drove away and kept driving, the life of Charlie Graves falling from him like rotten flesh with every mile, until he reached California and was Andy Bremer at last.
Weiss let him go. He turned in his mind back to the children. The two girls in the school doorway. Fatherless, motherless, alone. Mary took care of Olivia. She always had, that's how she was. Even later, even after she became the whore Julie Wyant, Weiss had heard she was still like that. She had an otherworldly air of tenderness about her—that's what made lonely middle-aged men fall in love with her, that and the otherworldly beauty of her face.
So she took care of Olivia. But then Olivia was taken away. The state, Child Protective Services, foster homes: the tw
o girls were separated. That's why Mary Graves "went bad, ran off," as Adrienne Chalk put it. That's why she became the whore Julie Wyant. She needed to make enough money to save her sister from the system, take care of her, put her through school so she could become a counselor or psychologist or whatever she was. Julie would not have left her sister behind. She would've gone on taking care of her as long as she could. Weiss didn't know how he knew this, but he knew it.
And that's why he knew what he had to do.
He was coming to the end of his search. Olivia was out there. In Phoenix, up ahead, where the lightning touched down. It had taken Weiss and his instincts to get this close to her—that's why the killer had hung back till now, stayed out of it, trailed behind him like a cloud of dust. But now that she was found, the rest would be easy. If anyone knew where Julie was, Olivia did, her sister did. There was nothing to keep the specialist from questioning her himself.
Weiss gripped the wheel, peered through the windshield. Pushed the Taurus on through the downpour.
It was time to meet with him, to meet with the killer. There was no other way to protect Olivia. It was time to talk with the specialist face-to-face. Just as he had in his dreams last night. Just as he had in his nightmares.
He drove on. He crossed through the rain into Arizona. He thought about the Graves family. He thought about his dreams. He knew what he had to do.
He had to meet the Shadowman.
25.
In the morning Sissy stepped out of her building and found Bishop waiting for her. Later she would tell me what happened between them, and that would become part of the story. But for now I was standing at the window of her apartment, watching. I saw Bishop there, three stories below. He was sitting astride his motorcycle at the curb, idling in the no-parking zone just outside the door. He was wearing his aviator shades and his ironic smile. He had the collar of his leather jacket turned up. His helmet was hanging on the handlebars. His sandy hair moved in the biting wind that funneled up the narrow street behind him.
When I saw him, when I saw Sissy approach him, I felt a stab of what I thought was disapproval. It was easy to disapprove of Bishop after all he'd done. It was easy to tell yourself you were a better man than he was. But in my case, I don't really think it was disapproval at all. I think I was jealous of him. The words Emma had spoken to me hung from my heart like an anchor. I want a man I can look up to and admire. Don't come back until you are one. It was the harshest thing anyone had said to me in my young life, harsher still coming from her, whom I loved. I was jealous of Bishop because I couldn't imagine any woman ever saying anything like that to him. He treated women like toys. He treated almost everyone like garbage. He was violent and reckless, and he didn't give much of a damn about anything. But I could not imagine a woman saying to him what Emma had said, and whatever he had that made that true, I wanted to have it as well.
I told myself I disapproved of him, but that was a lie. I wanted to be more like him.
Anyway, that was me, upstairs, watching from the window. Down on Jackson Street, Bishop caught Sissy's eye. He lifted his chin to her. He waited while she walked toward him. She was wearing a long blue overcoat, a woolen cap with blue stripes. Like all her outfits, it was schoolgirl stuff. She wore leather gloves and kept her hands clasped in front of her. She got a frown on her lips when she saw Bishop, like a prim eight-year-old girl watching some boys get muddy.
The look of her made Bishop snort. It made something cold and humorous go through the heart of him.
At his shoulder, the morning traffic on the hill rumbled end to end. The noise of the motors was loud. Sissy had to raise her whispery voice to be heard above it.
"Hello, Jim," she said. It was a cold, cold tone coming from her.
"I need to find Weiss," he told her.
"He's gone. I don't know where he is. He left me in charge. Can I help you in some way?"
Bishop ignored the cool voice, the scolding eyes. He couldn't have cared less what Sissy thought of him. If he wanted her to make noise, he'd fuck her. "No," he said curtly. "I need Weiss. I can't reach his cell phone. I sent him an email; I left a message on the machine at his apartment, but he hasn't called back."
"That's right. He's out of touch."
"That's it? He's just gone? He just left? There's no way to reach him?"
"He must've had some private business."
Pissed off, Bishop looked away. Private business. Bullshit. Weiss had gone to find the whore. He didn't want anyone to know where he was because he'd gone to draw the specialist into a showdown and save the whore and prove he was still some kind of hero instead of an over-the-hill Jew ex-cop picking up scraps as a private detective.
"Christ," Bishop said under his breath, the word lost in the motor noise from the Jackson Street traffic. He should just let the old man go, he thought, let him get himself killed. Fucking Weiss.
"Is there anything else I can do for you?" said Sissy coldly.
Bishop gave her a look. Her whole priggy schoolgirl routine was beginning to give him a pain. "If he was gonna leave someone a clue where he went, it'd be you, you or Ketchum."
"It wasn't me," she said.
Bishop nodded. "Well, if you think of anything, let me know. And if he gets in touch, tell him to call me."
"Well, he might not want to talk to you," Sissy said primly.
Bishop ran his gaze over her, from her wool cap to the gloved hands clasped in front of her, back up to her disapproving blue eyes. He didn't say anything, but he was thinking it. That was enough. The look made her blush.
"I don't give a fuck whether he wants to talk to me or not," he said. "Tell him to call me. If he goes after this guy alone, he's gonna get himself killed."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Just tell him, Sissy."
He made the sputtering Harley roar. He looked up at me. It was too quick. There was no time for me to pull back. He laughed. He gave me an ironic wave. Then he nodded at Sissy, curled the bike away from her into the traffic, and headed off down the hill.
26.
Next he broke into Weiss's apartment. He flipped the lock with a credit card. Stepped inside. Shut the door behind him.
The living room was in shadow. The window shades were half-drawn, blocking out the morning light. He could hear the traffic out on Russian Hill, but it was quiet inside. The unstirred dust of days hung in the air. The place felt abandoned.
Bishop stood just within the doorway. He gave the room what pilots call a block scan, moving his eyes over ten degrees of arc at a time. He started with the corner to his left. An open kitchen door. The white tile of the room beyond. The toaster on the counter. His gaze moved on another ten degrees. A desk, a swivel chair, a computer, a phone, the answering machine with its red answer light burning: no messages.
He went around the room like that, shifting his focus from one object to another. He looked at the wing chair in an alcove across from him, facing the bay window. There was a small round table by one arm. There were pale rings in the table's brown surface, stains left by the bottom of a glass. Bishop could picture Weiss sitting in the chair, looking out the bay window, sipping his Macallan.
The corner of his mouth twitched. Fucking Weiss, he thought. His gaze moved on.
To his right, he could see the foot of the bed through the bedroom door. The bed was neatly made, the bedspread smooth. Moving on, he saw, on the wall directly at his shoulder, a mirror and another chair. That was the end of the scan.
He went to the desk. He sat down in the swivel chair. The first thing he noticed was the cell phone, Weiss's cell phone, lying right there next to the computer keyboard. Bishop turned it over. The battery was gone. Weiss wanted to make himself that much harder to trace.
Bishop turned the computer on. As he waited for the machine to boot, he pulled open the desk drawers one by one. There wasn't much there. In one drawer he found a box of bullets but no gun. Weiss must've taken his old service revolver with him, that old snub-n
osed .38 he had. There was a twinge in Bishop's gut when he thought of Weiss going after the specialist with his old .38. The specialist with his SIG and his 1911 and his armor-piercing Saracen. He made a face. He slid the drawer shut hard.
He diddled with the computer for a while, but he was no hacker. Weiss had a code on his case files and his mail. Everything else was business letters, home accounting, that kind of thing. No clues to where he'd gone. The phone answering machine wasn't any help either. Bishop pressed the replay button, but all the messages had been erased.
He pushed back from the desk. Crossed the thin hemp rug. Went into the bedroom. Not much there either. A stack of magazines on the bedside table. Baseball Digest, Sports Illustrated, Baseball America, Newsweek, Law and Order. A book on the bottom of the pile: Let Freedom Ring. He picked up the remote, turned on the television at the foot of the bed. The voice of the anchorwoman was startling in the long-standing silence. FOX News. He turned the set off again.
He went out, back across the living room, back across the thin hemp rug, into the kitchen. He took a quick glance around. Banged through the cabinets. Brought down a drinking glass. He held the glass under the faucet and ran a thin layer of water onto the bottom. He carried the glass back into the living room.
He sat in Weiss's wing chair. He put the glass on the little round table by the chair's arm. He brought his cigarette pack and his plastic lighter out of the slash pocket of his leather jacket. He lit a cigarette. Pressed his head against the chair back and smoked, looking out through the bay window—through the bottom panes, the panes that weren't covered by the half-drawn blinds.
Outside, in the bright, cold morning, the wind was moving in the plane trees. There was a steep hill falling away from a grassy square, town house by town house lining the street, bay window after bay window, descending. On the sidewalk just across from him, a thick-set workman pushed a dolly past the hilltop. A young woman in a white sweater strode into the wind with great determination. On the street a blue station wagon rolled past, then a red coupe, then a green one. There were long moments between the cars when the corner was empty and still.
Damnation Street Page 15
